Nick Simonson
By Nick Simonson
As I waded deeper and deeper into the waters of angling with my good fishing buddy, we became focused each trip on the fish at hand. Walleyes in the early goings of the season, then smallmouth when the spring warmed up, crappies in the emergent reeds and then largemouth under the red-and-green canopy of lily pads. They were all part of the annual cycle leading up to the heart of summer that filled our after-work times and limited weekend windows. Under the blanket of humidity on those perfect July and August evenings to fill the downtime in trolling, we'd wax more philosophical about the entirety of the angling experience, and lament that we'd truly missed our calling – to be teachers so we'd have more of the summer to fish. While I've found that the idea of a three-month vacation isn't much of a reality in the modern profession of educating, I have discovered the joy my friends often reference in instructing and many days, feel that is a part of my calling in the outdoors.
So it was this weekend as I closed out teaching my first fishing course since the pandemic, with a class of five students learning how to tie flies, make jigs, craft spinners, and along the way get ideas to better their angling success and catch fish on the lures they made as part of the classes in the two weeks leading up to the on-the-water day. With the jigs and spinners they had crafted, they plied the waters of a small pond stocked with panfish and trout. As it turned out, some pretty big trout too, as a number of cutthroats in the two-to-three pound range had been loaded into the water and were ready biters on the sunny Saturday morning.
With a slight breeze blowing across the pond, and activity along the windward bank apparent, I asked the anglers what they saw, how they thought it influenced fishing, and what they felt were the best tactics as they moved along the shorelines of the small water, avoiding the back bay, where a mother goose had set up a nest, and chased a couple of them away with an audible hiss at the outset. It also served as a favorite teaching moment that I've had to learn more than once in my 30-plus years of spring fishing: "don't mess with mother goose," as I shared a few laughs of my wandering run-ins with and subsequent run-aways from the birds tucked into spring shoreline grasses elsewhere.
With the young sportsmen catching five, ten and even 15 fish each – most coming on lures they had made themselves – the day and the course was a success from that standpoint, but more so from what they took away from the classes and each cast that hit the water. One student, a bit dejected that he continued to snag up on an unseen branch below the surface, talked it through with me, and I explained that working the area was worth it, as fish relate to that structure, and jigs are cheap. A few casts later, his rod was doubled over, but not with the static bend of the branch below, but with the dynamic vibrations of a hooked fish coming from just off the sunken wood.
"See, if you ain't snaggin' – you ain't braggin'" I commented as he smiled for the camera with his catch before releasing it back into the pond.
Beyond my collection of shared and semi-trite outdoor adages though, I knew the tips for tying effective lures, deploying them on the right rods and line for the most effective presentation, and a few suggestions about how the rising spring sun, the prevailing westerly wind, and the turbidity of the pond water from recent rains all affected their angling that day gave them a jumpstart on their journey into fishing and a bunch of lessons learned to take with them. They were all more well off in that process than I was at their ages, and certainly had advanced further up the learning curve than my start had brought me.
More importantly, they too were invested in the moment - untethered from screens, real school and the demands of the busy final weeks in class - and focused on both the process of fishing and the fish before them. As we talked, they shared the details of what they planned to do with the rest of their summer, in the season of graduations and growing up many experience between the last day of school in May and the first one in late August, with most suggesting they'd be fishing a whole lot more after the course. While it may not drive the young students to the extremes of considering alternate employment under the false pretenses of three months' away, I felt confident that it would certainly give them enough knowledge to continue their learnings on the water…in our outdoors.
Simonson is the lead writer and editor of Dakota Edge Outdoors.
Featured Photo: Mason Klein of Bismarck, N.D. poses with a trout caught and released as part of the author-instructed spring fishing course. Simonson Photo.
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